Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Willard Bay

I know you may be tired of hearing me talk about swimming. If so, just replace the word "swim" with "Polka Dance" throughout this post. I have yet to write about Polka Dancing, so you can't possibly be sick of hearing me talk about that.

On Saturday we traveled north to Willard Bay for our third attempt to practice an open water swim. If you've been reading for a few months, you'll remember that the first attempt was so cold that my body actually got preserved, Walt Disney style, and I came out of it wondering whether I had slept through an entire generation of bad pop music. As it turned out, I was only frozen for 35 seconds (the amount of time I was in the water) and thus did not have the good fortune to sleep through however many seasons are left of Glee before it turns the human race so stupid that humanity can no longer survive. I give it 4 years. What can I say--I'm optimistic.

The second attempt was last week in The Great Barf Lake, which I am now convinced is actually controlled by The First Eye, who has made the island we attempted to get to somewhat of a permanent home. Why do I think The First Eye lives there? Mostly because the place was completely stripped of joy, but also because I saw some tracks that looked like his. (They looked like this - - - - - - - ).

So with only two weeks before the Ironman where we will hopefully not be swimming in liquid ice or barf, we ventured to a new body of water that was supposed to be "not that cold" and "not that dirty." Improvements all around.

We got to Willard Bay and performed our typical ritual of public indecency in the parking lot while putting on Larry and Seymour. After being disappointed, once again, that nobody seemed to take notice of our scandalous behavior, we wandered into the bay, screaming our usual screams as the icy water touched our feet.

But then a miracle happened.

Guys, I'm not kidding. Are you all sitting down?

I swam in a lake. I put my face in it. And I swam. Two weeks before the Ironman, I actually propelled myself forward in open water. And I didn't even scream that much.

Of course I did dramatically scream under water every time I saw anything that didn't seem to belong to me. Mostly I think I saw some plants here and there. But that didn't stop me from assuming that every single underwater object was a dead body attached to a shark attached to a cobra attached to Ebola virus attached to the Queen of Colors. But since we forgot to take a boat of life-guards with us, and since we were literally in the middle of the lake, there wasn't really anything I could do about it. Except for scream underwater. Every single time my face went in.

But before I knew it, I had made it to the other side of the bay. ALL the way to those rocks that looked so tiny from the beach. Based on my calculations, using my depth perception and a very scientific method of holding my arms out like this and estimating how many of those would span the bay, I calculated that we probably swam somewhere between 12 and 30 miles. Which is pretty good because we did it in about 45 minutes.

The only foil of our swim-to-no-spot-in-particular-but-get-to-those-rocks-on-the-other-side plan (hereinafter, "The Swim to Nowhere Plan") was that we both went in entirely different directions. And since Daniel is like a human speed boat, and I'm more like one of those Popsicle stick boats you made as a kid that are worthless unless placed in a current, within seconds of take off, I never saw which direction Daniel chose. Further, when I got to the rocks I found 37 people with fishing poles giving me the "thanks for scaring all the fish away by looking like Jaws was attacking you as you swam right passed our fishing lines" look as I climbed out of the water and onto a tall rock like a lake monster on a bad day.

All 37 people also wondered where the heck I had just come from and why I would swim in water that [fill in the blank reason that would have stopped me from swimming in that water had I known beforehand].

Eventually Daniel found me and let me know in no uncertain terms that we would not be swimming back. So we instead walked, barefoot, all the way around the bay, with an Old Testament's swarm of locusts following us the entire way as we stepped on every jagged rock and thorn ever produced by this world.

Well done on surviving Willard. The water isn't actually that horrible, most times, it's the flies/misqitoes/flying rats/gnats/evil, that swarms the place which gets ya.

If you're going that far north, try Pine View, it's less buggy, might be colder though. It's also smaller, which probably means nothing except you're more likely to get hit by a boat, but you wont get lost as easily.

How are you feeling about the big day Eli? Are you and Daniel Ready? I hope you plan on doing a post before the event. Please let us know how you two are handling this. BTW, if you die, who takes over the It Just Gets Stranger?